Nvidia reigns as most valuable firm after overtaking Apple anew

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Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has overtaken Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) to become the world’s most valuable company in the latest twist in a supremacy battle between the two tech giants.

Nvidia flipped Apple this week to take over at the top with a $3.43 trillion market cap. After modest gains over the past week, the iPhone maker’s market cap stands at $3.377 trillion. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), at third, is the only other company to hit $3 trillion, as Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) wrap up the top five.

It has been a spectacular rise for the chipmaker, which as recently as October 2022, was worth just $300 billion. Its fortunes changed drastically in November when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and within two months, the chatbot racked up 100 million users, the fastest rise for any consumer application.

Since then, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a household technology that has attracted hundreds of millions of users and is projected to deliver trillions of dollars by the decade’s end. Nvidia has been at the heart of the AI boom, selling the chips that are the lifeblood of this bustling sector. In June last year, the firm hit $1 trillion in market cap and has been setting revenue records along the way.

It’s not the first time Nvidia has overtaken Apple to become the world’s largest company. It first shot up to the top spot in June this year, but its reign only lasted one day before Apple recovered. However, both Apple and Microsoft have slumped on the back of lower-than-expected Q3 revenue reports and weaker projections for the fourth quarter.

Analysts expect this growth to continue. Fall Ainina, the research director at Ohio-based investment firm James Investment, commented, “Nvidia overtaking Apple in market cap not only conveys that it is the biggest beneficiary of the AI infrastructure cycle, but it suggests people expect the AI boom will continue.”

While Nvidia continues to soar on the AI mania, it’s an outlier in a sector where few have been able to break even. Despite investing billions of dollars in AI each quarter, tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, Salesforce (NASDAQ: CRM), and Tencent (NASDAQ: TCEHY) have yet to see a return on their investment. Software firms have fared the worst and are still struggling with the revenue model; some, like Microsoft and Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), have been integrating AI into existing products and charging higher for them, while others, like Zoom and Zendesk, are offering them for free to attract new users.

Still, the money is flowing into the much-hyped sector. Goldman Sachs (NASDAQ: GS) projects that tech giants and other multinationals will invest over $1 trillion in AI in the coming years. While most of it has gone toward establishing a lead over rivals, little has been channeled to addressing AI’s foundational challenges like hallucinations, transparency, bias, and privacy.

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Watch: Alex Ball on the future of tech: AI development and entrepreneurship